June 20, 2005

Mornings like this remind me why it's great to work at Webmail.us: we like to get things done! We decided that we had to have a feature on Friday morning. It was in testing that afternoon. It went on our system live over the weekend. This morning our customers have a useful new feature.

Winmail.dat - Proprietary Outlook Attachment

This weekend we updated our Webmail product to automatically decode a winmail.dat attachment and break it into an RTF document (Word compatible) and into
any other attachments that may have existed inside the winmail.dat.
Here's a little background info for those who want it:

When Outlook is configured to compose a message in Rich Text Format (RTF) it generates a file called winmail.dat, a specially encoded file with extra text color and formatting options. Before HTML was widely used to compose email, RTF was the way to get nicer formatting. But other email clients didn't know how to read the special encoding.

Even worse, normal files attached to an RTF'd email were sometimes authomatically zipped up into the winmail.dat as well. So an email sent from Outlook to Netscape Mail, Eudora, Mac Mail, etc. had this extra, useless attachment and no way to get at any other attachments that might have been sent. But our Webmail client will now allow our customers to get at all of the RTF information & other attachments they need.

Open Source Community

For any of you who follow our open-source doings, we are releasing this code to the community. There are another couple of important projects that we're finishing up over the next week or two. We're even planning a new section on our website just for projects completed in-house to be released under the GPL. I'm excited to blog about this more, but I'd better wait until we have at least one of those projects available for you to download!

May 27, 2005

We've been working hard on our documentation lately. The first priority has been to make new email client setup and user guides. Everything now on the Setup email client page is new and improved.

Resellers should like this because the PDF's can be edited with Adobe's PDF software or even with 3rd party PDF editors. So minor rebranding should be very easy to accomplish: swap a logo out, change a Webmail reference, etc. These are released under a Creative Commons license that allows reproduction and changes so long as we get attribution and there isn't a charge for the documentation (because we don't charge for it).

These are short, clean, and simple guides to set up and use email clients with our service. Here is the list of docs on the site right now:

We're working on more docs right now; Versamail comes to mind. Our service runs fine on Versamail (I'm using it on my Verizon Treo 650) and nearly all mobile email clients. As long as the program supports POP or IMAP and can do SMTP Authentication with our servers it should work.

March 18, 2005

On Monday of next week there will be a complete press release about this (subscribe to that RSS feed here). But I thought I’d give a little preview to blog readers.

Product Improvement Requests

We love getting product improvement requests! It’s a sign that our customers like our product well enough to give feedback and believe (correctly) that we’re the sort of company who will do what it can to make things better. That being said, some improvement requests people send to us are really bugs that have to be addressed immediately and they are.

But a lot of other fixes and improvments are more optional. We’ve lumped a bunch of these together and are releasing them together as Webmail 3.1.

Fixes and Improvements

One of our biggest requests was to have an easy way to flag a message as spam or as non-spam (good). Now you just view the email and click “Trust Sender” or “Report Spam” and you’re done!

Well, the 1-click demo will soon be version 3.1 if you just want to give it a quick peek later tonight. On Monday all new mailboxes that are created will default to 3.1 since the changes aren’t all that noticeable for most people. We’ll be moving everyone else to 3.1 over the next month or so.

Testing

We’ve been testing 3.1 internally for quite a while and haven’t had any issues. Our support email account has been using it—high volume with lots of attachments—and things have been good. The speed enhancements really help for users with a lot of email.

February 28, 2005

We are constantly updating our virus and spam filtering features. The sad reality is that virus and spam attacks change frequently so email providers have to keep up the pace or end up disappointing their customers.

Our Newest Filters

If one of our users sends an email with a virus in it, the email will not be delivered, and the user will receive an automated response from our server that lets the user know that their machine appears to be infected with a virus and needs to be disinfected. This is still “reactive” support, I know. But I just can’t think of a good way to download the right fix for each type of computer and each type of infection and then send that to the infected user. Let me know if anyone has any ideas.

We have also improved our scanning inside of attached graphics files (.png, .jpg, .gif) for certain types of viruses that use buffer overflows inside those graphics files to infect a new system.

Why?

Most commonly an email virus makes a fake “From” address for new emails it generates. A lot of people like to reply to an emailed virus and say something useful like, “Hey, Bob, you have a virus.” But because the “From” address was forged, Bob’s computer wasn’t really infected—Bob was simply another name in the address book of the infected computer. I did this once a long time ago. Sorry, Ted.

In an interesting but only partially related note, lots of anti-virus programs would auto-reply to these virus emails and accuse good people like Bob and Ted of being infected when they really weren’t. Our system at Webmail.us has always been smart and kind enough to not bother the addressee’s in the “From” field.

Anyway, a few viruses now use the real sender's email address in the "From" field and use proper SMTP settings from the computer's email program. In our case we can see these attempts and will be letting the user know that they need to look at running some anti-virus updates.

And we needed to increase our scanner’s abilities with graphics files. Some graphic files have a little information field that indicates the total size of the graphic file. But certain viruses now put in a bad piece of data in that size field and then tack on malicious computer instructions at the end of the graphic file that act as the virus. We’re now better at catching those viruses.

The Order Of Things

We scan for viruses first. That way, if a message is infected with a virus, we can skip the spam filtering and save a little processing power for moving more legitimate email.

More To Come

I’ll give an overview of our entire virus and spam prevention approach sometime in the next few weeks for those of you who are curious.